Media & Communications Corner: What Matters in Client Reports

Whether you work in-house or for a public relations agency, producing an activity report is undoubtedly a regular task, be it weekly, monthly or quarterly. For some, tracking and reporting ongoing activity, especially across teams, can be daunting.

Done right, though, creating activity reports can be more than a regurgitation of effort and achievement ' they can be crucial tools to identify trends and business opportunities, which for a consulting agency can bring you closer to being integral to your firm or client's business development efforts.

What Makes a Great Report?

If you think back to grade school and the scientific method, it becomes obvious: problem, hypothesis, experiment, observation, and conclusion. In a practical sense, this means there should be measureable expectations in place from the start of the relationship or campaign. Any effort should be geared toward achieving the agreed upon goals, and those goals should be reflected and tracked in the activity report.

What Are the Goals?

Gone are the days of trying to evaluate ROI by comparing
column inches for each article that was placed with the
equivalent-sized advertising costs. So, how does one measure return? The truth is, it remains a sticky proposition.

By its nature, public relations is about heightening firm/company, service/and or product awareness and building a positive reputation. Often, PR practitioners have different approaches to measuring results. One agency might be able to tie its efforts directly to the number of widgets the company sold that quarter over the same quarter the previous year.

In this column, however, we are dealing with legal services. Not exactly a widget ' or is it? We may be working in a service-based industry, but there are ways to bundle results. Counting the number of media placements is still the primary metric that most clients care about. However, since a public relations campaign invariably has multiple objectives, measuring outcomes should be preferred to measuring media.

For example, you can make your measurements more meaningful by evaluating the quality of the placements: Did they amplify the client's core message? Did they positively support the firm's market positioning? What impressions were readers left with about the firm? Was the firm's competitor(s) mentioned in the article?

On the subject of competitors, are you tracking their media placements? For example, why were they quoted in that Wall Street Journal article and not your guys? How does their share of voice stack up against your clients'? This can also be a useful metric in a “down” month when the media wasn't interested in what you had to offer, i.e., you can show your client that its competition also wasn't getting coverage. Over time, you may see trends develop and learn to predict when to strike with your niche pitch.

Business Objectives

How closely are your PR efforts connected to the firm's business objectives? This can be nearly impossible to quantify, unless you have reporting on the client's side that allows you to correlate incoming new business requests, conference networking results, website analytics, et al. Even without that, hopefully your client will be able to identify whether a new piece of business came in as a result of someone reading an article you placed ' and tell you about it! These short-term successes add up. Two years from now, will the client remember that that piece of business led to another and yet another? If you have activity tracking in place, you will be in a position to report how your efforts contributed to their success.

Which brings us to reputation, brand equity and market leadership, all of which are garnered over time. If you have base metrics from an initial report, one year later it will be easier to identify how far you've moved the needle. We asked some of the best minds in the business what their best practices are for reporting. This is what we found out.

• Garbage in equals garbage out. If you want meaningful analysis, you have to take the time to input the data and ensure its accuracy.
• Make sure that you're inputting the right data so that it can be manipulated, whether by date, practice, attorney, publication or media type.
• Get proficient with Excel, and get creative. Develop charts so that clients can get quick snapshots. They might not have the time, or even the inclination to read yet another document on their already long reading list. Impressive visuals that convey your successes (and, ultimately theirs) will stick in their minds.
• Over time, you can slice and dice the data and identify trends. You can then leverage the data to go deeper in focus groups, polls and surveys.
• Use Google Analytics on the firm's/company's website to identify where the traffic is coming from. How many hits were the result of articles you placed? How many people checked out an attorney's profile after hearing him present at a conference you set up? How many visited the site after reading a list of award winners, that you were responsible for instigating?
• Social Media can and should be measured.

The question of how frequently results should be reported ' weekly, monthly, or quarterly ' is a client-by-client situation. What matters most is that results are shared regularly.

Conclusion

With preset measureable goals and proper reporting that speaks to those goals, both agency and client will be able to engage intelligently in strategic conversations. Measurement reveals the difference between perception and reality, builds trust; more often than not both sides will find business insights that they couldn't have found otherwise.

Nicholas Gaffney, a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors, is a lawyer and former journalist. Nick manages Infinite Public Relations' San Francisco office and can be reached at [email protected] or 415-732-7801.

Whether you work in-house or for a public relations agency, producing an activity report is undoubtedly a regular task, be it weekly, monthly or quarterly. For some, tracking and reporting ongoing activity, especially across teams, can be daunting.

Done right, though, creating activity reports can be more than a regurgitation of effort and achievement ' they can be crucial tools to identify trends and business opportunities, which for a consulting agency can bring you closer to being integral to your firm or client's business development efforts.

What Makes a Great Report?

If you think back to grade school and the scientific method, it becomes obvious: problem, hypothesis, experiment, observation, and conclusion. In a practical sense, this means there should be measureable expectations in place from the start of the relationship or campaign. Any effort should be geared toward achieving the agreed upon goals, and those goals should be reflected and tracked in the activity report.

What Are the Goals?

Gone are the days of trying to evaluate ROI by comparing
column inches for each article that was placed with the
equivalent-sized advertising costs. So, how does one measure return? The truth is, it remains a sticky proposition.

By its nature, public relations is about heightening firm/company, service/and or product awareness and building a positive reputation. Often, PR practitioners have different approaches to measuring results. One agency might be able to tie its efforts directly to the number of widgets the company sold that quarter over the same quarter the previous year.

In this column, however, we are dealing with legal services. Not exactly a widget ' or is it? We may be working in a service-based industry, but there are ways to bundle results. Counting the number of media placements is still the primary metric that most clients care about. However, since a public relations campaign invariably has multiple objectives, measuring outcomes should be preferred to measuring media.

For example, you can make your measurements more meaningful by evaluating the quality of the placements: Did they amplify the client's core message? Did they positively support the firm's market positioning? What impressions were readers left with about the firm? Was the firm's competitor(s) mentioned in the article?

On the subject of competitors, are you tracking their media placements? For example, why were they quoted in that Wall Street Journal article and not your guys? How does their share of voice stack up against your clients'? This can also be a useful metric in a “down” month when the media wasn't interested in what you had to offer, i.e., you can show your client that its competition also wasn't getting coverage. Over time, you may see trends develop and learn to predict when to strike with your niche pitch.

Business Objectives

How closely are your PR efforts connected to the firm's business objectives? This can be nearly impossible to quantify, unless you have reporting on the client's side that allows you to correlate incoming new business requests, conference networking results, website analytics, et al. Even without that, hopefully your client will be able to identify whether a new piece of business came in as a result of someone reading an article you placed ' and tell you about it! These short-term successes add up. Two years from now, will the client remember that that piece of business led to another and yet another? If you have activity tracking in place, you will be in a position to report how your efforts contributed to their success.

Which brings us to reputation, brand equity and market leadership, all of which are garnered over time. If you have base metrics from an initial report, one year later it will be easier to identify how far you've moved the needle. We asked some of the best minds in the business what their best practices are for reporting. This is what we found out.

• Garbage in equals garbage out. If you want meaningful analysis, you have to take the time to input the data and ensure its accuracy.
• Make sure that you're inputting the right data so that it can be manipulated, whether by date, practice, attorney, publication or media type.
• Get proficient with Excel, and get creative. Develop charts so that clients can get quick snapshots. They might not have the time, or even the inclination to read yet another document on their already long reading list. Impressive visuals that convey your successes (and, ultimately theirs) will stick in their minds.
• Over time, you can slice and dice the data and identify trends. You can then leverage the data to go deeper in focus groups, polls and surveys.
• Use Google Analytics on the firm's/company's website to identify where the traffic is coming from. How many hits were the result of articles you placed? How many people checked out an attorney's profile after hearing him present at a conference you set up? How many visited the site after reading a list of award winners, that you were responsible for instigating?
• Social Media can and should be measured.

The question of how frequently results should be reported ' weekly, monthly, or quarterly ' is a client-by-client situation. What matters most is that results are shared regularly.

Conclusion

With preset measureable goals and proper reporting that speaks to those goals, both agency and client will be able to engage intelligently in strategic conversations. Measurement reveals the difference between perception and reality, builds trust; more often than not both sides will find business insights that they couldn't have found otherwise.

Nicholas Gaffney, a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors, is a lawyer and former journalist. Nick manages Infinite Public Relations' San Francisco office and can be reached at [email protected] or 415-732-7801.